Use of Gas Chromatograms of the Essential Leaf Oils of the Genus Eucalyptus for Taxonomic Purposes

Abstract

Using morphological observations, botanists have classified Eucalyptus species into characteristic series. A new vacuum distillation technique has been employed to obtain the characteristic leaf oils, which are very close to their in vivo compositions, from 35 species belonging to series Tetrapterae, series Torquatae and series Rufispermae. Accurate gas chromatograms have been obtained for each species and three analytical techniques (principal component analysis (PCA), hierarchical cluster analysis (CA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA)) have been used to process these chromatograms to see if agreement with these classifications could be achieved without using any auxiliary morphometric data. For the species chosen for the present study, linear discriminant analysis was the most successful in assigning species to their present botanic classifications. These analytical methods were also used with some success in searching for groupings within a series and within a species.